Template:TRANSMISSION MODEL – RITUAL MODEL OF COMMUNICATION

TRANSMISSION MODEL – RITUAL MODEL OF COMMUNICATION

ANNOTATION

|...| James W. Carey A Cultural Approach to Communication, in Communication as Culture, Essays on Media and Society, Unwin Hyman 1989</ref>

Following Dewey (1916) Carey outlines two views of communication 


(1) the transmission model which is associated with imparting, sending, transmitting, giving, passing along and is linked to modes of transportation. There was an equivalence, until the telegraph, of the movement of information and the movement of goods and people , which was linked to the building of infrastructures and the maintenance of the same. . Transmission of messages over distance was “for the purposes of control”

As Dewy had made clear earlier, transport and communications had been linked since the time of the Egyptians. Rapid transportation allowed distribution of information . (Electronic) telegraphy offers not only the “modification of matter but the transmission of thought” (4). A religious undercurrent is central to the transmission model.

(2) the ritual model of communication centres on sharing, participation, association and fellowship [the values of social media], possession of a common faith or belief; community, consensus, communion. The ritual model does not emphasise the extension of messages in space but the maintenance of a society in time. It is not about imparting information but representing shared beliefs. Furthermore prayer, the chant, the ceremony which ensures the construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful world = the control and maintenance of human action (5). Durkheim wrote in 1953: “Society substitutes for the world revealed to our senses a different world that is a projection of the ideals created by a community.”

The transmission model was dominant in the united states. For Carey, the concept of “culture” was too weak to allow for the acceptance of the ritual model [a view may need revision after the rise of affective media such as Facebook, reality TV and conviction driven news media such as Fox News] Why? = obsessive individualism which hightens psychological life; puritanism which encourages productive activity; isolation from the sense of shared culture. [The naturalisation of science as something outside of culture] Science is not recognised as a cultural [or ideological] force, it is somehow “culture free”.

Newspapers are now taken as a study subject of the models of transmission and ritual. News as media embodies both of these models and can be read simultaneously on both registers. Ritual allows activism and action; news does not change but is intrinsically satisfying a view of reality that gives life an overall form “order, tone”. News is historically specific (we might live to see the “last newspaper”. It was produced first in the 18th century for the middle classes and it will fall into obsolescence “like other human inventions. Key to this news media, in relation to the ritual model, is that does not convey information but produces drama” portraying an arena for dramatic forces and action. “It invites our participation on the basis of our assuming, often vicariously, social rules within it. [ see Malinowski’s “phatic communication”] For Dewy, [giving hardcore liberal reasoning] communication makes society possible: “consensus demands communication.”